How Shakespeare's Sonnets drew on Metamorphoses
A documented line of influence: William Shakespeare demonstrably engaged Ovid’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 8
Ancient RomeThe influenced
Shakespeare's Sonnets
William Shakespeare · 1609
PoetsRelevance
8/10
On Shakespeare's Sonnets’s page
- When Shakespeare promises his verse will outlive marble and gilded monuments (Sonnets 55, 60, 65), he's standing on Ovid — the poetry-outlasts-time idea comes straight from the close of Metamorphoses Book 15
- He knew Ovid intimately: in Latin from grammar school, and in Golding's 1567 translation, the version he read and lifted from
- Read Ovid's ending first and you'll hear Shakespeare progressively transforming the boast across the sequence — same claim, made personal and obsessive
On Metamorphoses’s page
- Ovid was Shakespeare's favorite poet — he met him in Latin at Stratford Grammar School and again in Arthur Golding's 1567 English, the translation he read and borrowed from
- The close of Metamorphoses Book 15, where Ovid declares his verse will outlast bronze and time itself, is the seed of the Sonnets' boldest claim
- That immortalizing-power-of-poetry conceit — verse as a defense against decay — Shakespeare takes and reworks into his own thing from Sonnet 60 onward